How to crush your opponents in Pokémon Go gym battles

If math isn’t your thing, and you don’t want to spend hours crunching data to figure out which Pokémon are the best battlers, we have a very easy solution for you.

TheSilphRoad, aPokémon Gosubreddit, has evolved into one of the best locations for Pokémon Go trainers to gather and share notes. TheSilphRoad's community has developed a Top DPS & Damage Pokémon spreadsheet that’s one of the best, easiest-to-understand data dumps we’ve seen.

Pokemon Go

If you examine your individual Pokémon, you will see that they break down into types, like Water, Ground, Poison, Fairy, etc. Pokémon attacks also break down into types, with many of the same labels: Dragon, Ghost, Water, or Ground, for example.

Different types of attacks do better or worse against specific types of Pokémon. A Water attack, for example, tends to do more damage to a Fire-type Pokémon than against a Water-type Pokémon.

TheSilphRoad

Here’s where the spreadsheet comes in: It allows you to sift through all the possible attacks a Pokémon can have, and then to look up how much damage that attack does against specific types of Pokémon. Select the DAMAGEvTYPES tab in the upper-left corner of the spreadsheet to examine all these relationships.

What this means is that when you examine a gym and see what types of Pokémon are defending it, you can then select a lineup of Pokémon whose attacks take advantage of the weaknesses of the Pokémon defending the gym. Figuring out these relationships is the sort of thing that ultimately separates the best gym battlers from the rest of the pack.

You can also see which Pokémon are the most devastating battlers in general by clicking the RANK_DAMAGE tab. We haven’t caught any Mewtwo yet, but we can speak from experience and confirm that Snorlax and Vaporeon are fantastic in gym battles. The spreadsheet is absolutely correct on this point.

Make sure to check out our list of all the best sources for detailed Pokémon data, most of which are pulled straight from the game code itself.